In McAlester, Muskogee, Tulsa or Oklahoma City in the years between the two World Wars, an old man was often seen seated on a stool at a busy street corner, his long hair in braids, a battered Stetson on his head and wearing cowboy boots and a greasy-looking fringed buckskin jacket, literally covered with badges and souvenirs he had acquired in his travels. Always there was an open suitcase, much the worse for wear, on the sidewalk at his feet, containing stacks of a little twenty-eight-page booklet, purporting to be the true story of his life, which you could purchase for a dime each. He was Texas Jack, "the famous bandit" - and he was not the fake many people believed him to be. Few, however, had the temerity to question the authenticity of his published "True Adventures" to his face or to dispute his authorship. If he "wrote" the little paperback that sold thirty-five thousand copies or more, he had the help of some unknown newspaperman who knew how to put a sentence together. It is a collector's item today.
According to the record, Texas Jack was not a killer, but he was a first-class train and bank robber, and unlike other Indian Territory outlaws, he roamed far and wide. Working alone, he stuck up a Santa Fe express in Colorado, robbed a bank at Riverside, Texas, held up a stagecoach at Canyon Gap, Colorado, robbed another Texas bank in 1891 and followed it with holding up a San Antonio stage. Moving into Missouri, he knocked off the bank at Southwest City. In 1894, ten years after his first foray outside the law, he took part in his last robbery, a gang holdup of a Katy train at Blackstone Switch, at Wybark, eight miles north of Muskogee, at 10:10 p.m., November 13, 1894.; a fiasco in which he was so seriously wounded that it brought his outlaw career to an end.
His honest name was Nathaniel Reed, and he was born near St. Paul, in Madison County, Arkansas, March 23, 1862. It was not to escape from abject poverty that he turned to outlawry. Reading between the lines of his book, one gets the feeling that he accepted banditry as a profession in quite the same way in which he regarded medicine or the law.
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http://www.jcs-group.com/oldwest/outlaws/jack.html
